Pinned Queen Emotional Damage! | Quick Wins #45
#english #quickwin #chesstactics #queenblunder #queenpin
chess noob Quick Wins! is a series of short videos, to demonstrate very quick wins! As a beginner, you become aware of the Scholar's Mate and the Fool's Mate, but neither of these show up in real games. However, there are tricky quick checkmates and wins that occur, even at the intermediate level of chess.
This game ended in 9 moves, and it is perhaps a lesson on why freestyling an unfamiliar opening can be dangerous! My opponent had the White pieces and played the English Opening (1. c4), which is a perfectly good opening. I play according to opening principles - take the centre with two pawns if allowed, develop pieces, knights before bishops. Following these principles, we effectively entered the "Two Knights Variation" of the English (1. c4 e5 2. Nc3 Nf6) and then followed a line of book moves.
On move 5, White played an early aggressive queen move (5. Qb3) that I was reasonably sure was dubious, but not necessarily bad. Stockfish agrees, giving the evaluation of about [-0.5]. We trade knights, and I develop my remaining queen's knight. At this point, I noticed that White's king and queen were on the same diagonal... and on move 7, White blunders by developing their other knight. You always need to be wary when your queen and king are on the same diagonal! In this game, the killer blow immediately came next with (7... Bb4) pinning the queen to the king. The queen was lost with my knight advancing forward into the position. White, hungry to regain material capture my seemingly hanging pawn on e5 but missed the fact that I now had (9... Nc2+), absolute fork of the king and rook! Suffering emotional damage, White resigned. GG!
Game on chess.com: https://www.chess.com/game/live/83412975703
